LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features
https://manualdousuario.net/en/libreoffice-download-record-no-ai/Open linkView original on lemmy.mlSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.mlhttps://manualdousuario.net/en/libreoffice-download-record-no-ai/Open linkView original on lemmy.ml
107 replies
I was prompted by this announcement to download it. An office suite came installed by default with this machine, but I want to support their numbers and start promoting it to others.
I've used their stuff for years, definitely solid
I'm an accountant. I use Libreoffice to write complex written documents and manage reasonably large data sets for 40 hours a week for the last decade, and openoffice before that. I encourage my small team to do the same and for the most part, they do. We all have both libreoffice and microsoft suites on our desktops.
It's fine. I feel like it's the humble workhorse that has served me very well for many years with no fuss.
I'm sure someone will be along in a moment to tell us all about how any serious professional uses excel. There always is in these threads.
For my own part I feel like LibreOffice is one of the great success stories of open source.
Why would they call it Excel if it didn't EXCEL over the rest?? Checkmate DORK
/s
Same here, i had a business, 80 employees, 4 retail spaces. I used Open office and then Libre Office. I sold my business. many years back but still use Libre office today
I started on Lotus 1-2-3
Maybe sqlite?
/s
I worked at a nonprofit that helped out homeless people. 500+ employees, terminals at dozens of locations, all using Ubuntu and LibreOffice for everything. It was fine. Uneventful, even. And they saved sooo much money because they never had to pay a dime to anyone besides the internal IT department. This open source stuff is imo better than the big corporate products for professional use because updates don’t break workflows as much.
I'm a Very Serious professional (inhouse) accountant. I use Excel because Visual Basic allows me to access the file system and automate everything. I don't like it, but it is what it is. I sometimes make sheets that don't even open Excel. In Excel of course. It's probably not the right tool for that, but it's the hammer that I've got and which the company allows.
I know that LibreOffice also have macros, but in comparison, it's much more difficult to program because there isn't 1000 other accounts asking the same question online, so ressources are scarce.
Also the keyboard shortcut for Autosum. Can't find it in LibreOffice. At this point, it's the only formula that I use, because I have been accustomed to entering my data in a way that everything is a sum. Substraction is a sum including a negative number. Multiplication is a sum of sums. Division is the opposite of multiplication, so also a sum. I only use Sum, with the occasional Sumif, Sumifs and SumProduct.
I do use LibreOffice at home, but do wish they'd make a keyboard shortcut for Sum.
I'm a simple support who occasionally work with personal data stored in CSV and JSON. Libreoffice sucks. For example: deduplication hiden behind "create autofilters > press on any filter > filter by condition > standard filter > remove selected field > press options > no duplications". Cool, eh? And for some reason it doesn't work if at least one field selected, which is completely unintuitive. There other quirks too, like completely hidden in settings function to display more than 1 million rows, wich is disabled by default and there no notification that your document exceed this. I already forgot other issues that I faced with it, but yeah, not a fan of it. It's good untill you start actually use it.
That being said, it's free, open source and works most of the time, especially if you just need to view some data, from this side of things it have almost zero competition.
Did you send a ticket about those bugs?
It's not a bug, it's a feature that was made like that from the start. Link1 , Link2 , Link3. It also a known issue that you can't deduplicate sorted\filtered table. Just not a thing. Deal with it.
No, I have not. I did my share of reporting bugs and requesting features in OSS, but assholes like dude below will never be happy about me, cause how dare I to call out on obvious flaw in open software! OSS doesn't have issues, YOU LYING! I'm done. Kinda burned out. OSS community sucks and can go fuck itself.
LOL. I knew you'd be along.
Is that what you intended to say? Or do you have actual argument against what I said?
In my former job they kept telling me (well ordering/demanding is closer) to use MS office, I held on to LibreOffice. The usual 'we have complex documents" excuse yet no one ever noticed my rebellion.
What the hell man. Who is still funding this bubble?
Technocratic billionaires who want to enslave everyone who isn’t white, rich, male, and in their little club.
Carlin couldn't have said it better.
They gotchya by the balls!
Man died fortuitously before ever seeing any of the late-stage capitalism horror.
Enslavement is the old, pre-AI mindset.
They want to replace all labor with AI, then exterminate us. They'll start with pointless wars, disease, etc. Then on to starvation and dehydration. And once our numbers are whittled down enough, they'll send in the drones to wipe out any last survivors.
For all of history the ruling class has been 'held back' by one crucial flaw: as much as they detest us, they need the workers to actually do the labor and build the luxuries they enjoy. With ever more advanced AI, that age is ending ... or at least that's what they think.
Do Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai strike you as extremely white names?
Edit: to be clear, some of those people are really quite racist... But I am not so sure that's such a determining factor in the larger sector.
I guess just "technocratic billionaires who want to own everything" is enough of a descriptor, then.
And I don't think "their little club" is a factor, either. If they ever manage to own everything, they'll just go after each other sooner or later, and their insatiable greed will burn the world to ashes.
Not much for the history of white supremacists and how they use useful idiots, huh? Yes, there are awful people of every race color and creed that think they’ll be in the fun authoritarian group. What a novel realization you’ve come across.
White is not an actual concern of theirs, they pretend it is because they are allied to the right wing's sort of base in that sense. That right wing will be enslaved like everyone else without money if they get their way, and plenty of non white rich will be in the club.
It's about class, it's always been about class to the ruling class.
You clearly haven’t read their very publicly published self aggrandizing autobiographies and ranting about their plans for a white supremacist technocratic serfdom, they state plainly that blood and soil is very much a concern of theirs.
I have not directly read them, I have links on another computer though somewhere saved, from the collapse dudes on that corporate social media forget what they were called, what is the name of the great thinker of theirs, Yarvin and all.
Be all that as it may, the way it will play out is those with the means to protect themselves (for now they will alll be ground under the boot,) will be fine, and that includes a lot of non white foreign rich.
And that most of the racism from the ruling class is just playing the rubes so they can make more money and get more unaccountable power.
It really is like that, even as many are racist themselves as you allude to.
It's literally 1/4 of the entire worlds stock market and superannuation and investments now... And a lot more in derivatives (bets on how the future will pan out).
So.. the entire world's leaders and financial industry is either FOMO or holding, and throwing stuff into the cash fire in the hope the flame doesn't go out and tank the entire world in a financial disaster that'll rival that of 100 years ago.
Its beyond reckless.
Even if the cookers are right and AI pans out and it does replace 30% of jobs or something - congrats, leaders and finance dregs, now you have an entirely new disaster to deal with that you funded.
I think they'd rather let 30% die than deal with the problems they create
Didn't you hear!? We did it, we have AGI this time™. It's the future bro! This time it'll be different! Just one more datacenter! Just a few thousand more GPUs and you too can own AGI!
We have AGI
Amazing, thank you.
NVIDIA is perpetuating it, and AI startups are trying to peddle it, plus the the tech companies are using it.
Your retirement fund is fining it by proxy via the investment firms that manage retirement funds
Oh what a dystopia we live in. We went from companies declaring they have AI as a feature added to their product, to companies declaring they don't have AI added to their products to promote them. A clear sign AI is complete slop.
It heavily depends on what market they are trying to tap in. LibreOffice always was in the Linux marketpalce, where chances are you will find a community of more privacy oriented people that prefer less bloat, less telemetry and third party dependencies. It only makes sense for them to keep an "old school cool" approach.
Wish more companies would be like that, but sadly we live in our own bubble and there are A TON of people that just simply traded in their brains for AI these days.
I love LibreOffice.
My only complaint using it every day at work is [a complaint against microsoft] how much my company uses microsoft products (but won't shell out for office licenses for 90% of staff) and microsoft purposefully makes their shit not display or read Libre files correctly to try to keep their grubby monopoly claws dug into everyone.
My IT staff is too stupid to send announcements out to a BCC list and causes reply-all waves about once a month so I am not holding out hope that we make any progress as a company towards smart computing.
Oh damn I remember working at a telecom company in the early 2000s. About once every quarter someone would email the corporate distribution list with an announcement that was intended for just their team.
The subsequent avalanche of people replying all with "don't CC me on this kind of email" followed by the inevitable follow up of people with no self awareness replying all that people shouldn't be so stupid as to reply all to a corporate wide email because it can crash the email server followed by yet another wave of people replying all to point out that the person just did the same thing and mock them... Then the email server would actually crash, then there would be an official message from leadership telling people not to email the corporate directory, and not to reply all of someone did...
Then inevitably someone would get back from leave a couple of days later and reply all again telling people not to CC then on that type of email...
It was downright hilarious.
It's one of the perks of the job. At my last company, we'd let those things run their course before cleaning up the mess. It was always a good reminder that the majority of the company is too dumb to be left unsupervised with anything more advanced than a basic calculator.
Hey, happy cake day!
Where do you work, the second tier of hell?! JFC.
It feels like...
How the hell is sending to high user count DLs not restricted to people capable of thinking and breathing at the same time (or managment, which ever signs your paychecks)?
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... inhale HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Anyone with access to a computer can e-mail the entire company with one address. Hell, the way they are setup, I would not even be a little bit shocked to find out someone outside the company e-mail system could e-mail the entire company if that address got leaked...
Omg, I just checked... One of our IT people has sent us mail via the "entire company list" from their personal gmail account before...
[thousand yard stare]... You have my sympathies...
Glad Libreoffice is getting more attention; started using it as soon i went to Linux a couple of months ago. And now, ive been slowly getting my mother on the FOSS bandwagon cause shes getting tired of MAC
I recently introduced my dad to libreoffice and he won’t stop talking about how great it is. I’m just like. Wait until you try Linux haha
That's adorable 🧔♂️❤️
Thats awesome that you got your dad on board with it, and slowly moving him to rabbit hole🤣. My father unfortantly is not tech savy, i would have to introduce it real slow for him or if he is interested, find a distro that operates similar to Windows. I do know he would change though if my mother changes her OS..... maybe.
when i'm finally working again and able to donate to some projects, libreoffice is definitely getting a little love.
I give €3 a month. It's not a lot, but I don't use LibreOffice that heavily.
Good luck with getting a job that pays your bills, and hopefully you love.
thank you
The school I go to demands we use Google Docs (or Office at home) for our work. Boowomp, I'll still use LibreOffice. Fuck GenAI.
krusie mentioned
What is that, some kind of furry shit?
it's a popular ship in the game deltarune
Oh I see, thanks 😄
Been using Libre Office since I moved to W10 LTSC IoT about two years ago. Libre Office just works.
As a person who works in IT support I'm not scared of AI.. I'm scared of Linux and Libre.. Modern day Microsoft don't know how to build an operating system and Microsoft from 20 years ago have no idea how to stop F#%king Excel and word from crashing for no reason.
Microsofts sheer incompetence keeps me employed. Adobe's pure evil business plan also keeps me employed.. Adobe Acrobat is one of the worst pieces of garbage software (alongside Excel and word).
Please keep telling your company how scared you are of Libre! I need my job and I hate Microsoft and Adobe more than you do.
Edit: Removed a bit that doesn't work and is just offensive..
Just grow tomatoes goddamn, asking the whole world to keep using Adobe. Selfish smdh
Hey, I like adobe sauce. No wait, isn't that adobo sauce? I get so confused in my old age....
Wait what? How did you get that from ever I've said..? I hate Adobe
How else to interpret wanting to keep your job that depends on Adobe being popular and bad? I ain't actually mad at ya, it's just jokes anyway
Yeah fair I don't want Adobe to exist I'm just happy that they do because they're so terrible and horrible that I have a job. It's a joke I make when I'm talking to old Gen X and baby boomers at my work who are confused why Adobe Acrobat has broken again and made their lives difficult. Every day I'm fixing Adobe Acrobat errors.
I'm pulling a sneaky working from home on Linux and using all open source PDF stuff, nobody knows how unbothered I am and I'm not telling
It has totally nothing to do with Office being a pile of subscription based dogshit
What's "Office"? Did you mean "Microsoft 365 Copilot"?
And yes, the premium domain https://office.com/ now redirects to https://m365.cloud.microsoft/ and there's not a single mention of "Office", the world's most recognized software suite for decades.
This is a PR stunt at the level of X killing the blue bird.
At this rate we'll end up with Microsoft Xbox Series Copilot 360 Experience X II too soon
And you'll pay by the hour for every hour you decide to actually use it
AI will play the games for you, when you don't.
... Black Belt Edition ' Turbo Omega. With a cherry on top.
Teams With Cortana™
It's wild to me that I only ever heard of LO just two years ago. (When they decided to paywall notepad it was the last straw for me.)
Feels so so good to ditch Microsoft products.
LibreOffice is great and glad they are getting the shine they deserve.
LibreOffice is great and nice to see it getting some attention.
LibreOffice is the good stuff if you need an office suite. It can do everything you might actually need and the price is right. But I'm old and retired and no longer have a need for a full office suite. I find AbiWord and Gnumeric all I need anymore. It kind of makes me sad to do so, but I uninstall LibreOffice these days.
Shit, I still use GobeProductive 3. Little more than 50 mb gets you a word processor, spreadsheet, image and graphics and a power point maker. And it's pretty nice having my docs in a format that nobody even can open or convert.
Abiword and Gnumeric are great too!
It took me longer than I care to admit that I no longer needed a full office suite. And for me, Abiword and Gnumeric meet my light and simple needs.
I still have feelings for LibreOffice though.😰
I've been using OpenOffice for forever, before it was cool
I used OpenOffice until it didn't work for some reason, I switched to LibreOffice and I haven't looked back.
Its been unmaintained for years.
Guess I better switch, too!
It didn't for some reason? It didn't work for a relatively precise reason.
And that reason is Larry Ellison. He (Oracle) bought Sun, which was leading the OpenOffice.org project.
At the time Google was still not evil, people thought Facebook was a good idea. It was the time when people actually liked big tech.
Even then Ellison was already so massively disliked in the industry that the very moment he got his hands on OO.o LibreOffice was created and all contributors jumped ship.
Larry Ellison was the reason
I remember using it when it was Star Office... Think it got given away on a cover disk on a magazine.
I used it. It was good for it's time.
Openoffice was always cool!
James was always cool.
For a few years I had a subscription to Office. I thought I was more productive.
But I.... probably wasn't?
It's hard to qualify. LibreOffice always felt like an office suite. "You can do things here." Boom. I did it.
Office was like "But wait! There's a zillion more things you can do! Until your subscription expires at least."
But then I got curious. How exactly do I do these zillion new things in LibreOffice??? They claim to be mostly document compatible, so how do I do the same stuff?
Aha. I can actually do this shit. Turns out most of this stuff was very minor spreadsheet thingamaijggery. Want to lock rows or columns? It's slightly different. Want to do weird icons for values? It's slightly different. Etc.
Very important learning experience!
It took me forever to learn that Calc refers to cells in other sheets like SheetName.CellNumber while Excel and Google Sheets use SheetName!CellNumber and I just thought either LibreOffice was broken or I was always doing something else wrong.
I've written books and papers in Writer. It does the job well.
On the other hand, openai's codex literally bundles in libreoffice https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/1/codex-libreoffice/
I hope that is not where the downloads come from
It's not. They don't actually bundle the normal LibreOffice. Instead they ship LOkit, the special embeddable version that's also the basis of Collabora Office. So: different download
Intresting feature they have without implementing it
I like LibreOffice, it's good
LibreOffice also has a nice webdav integration so you can tie a Nextcloud account in and automatically checkout and edit documents in a multi user environment. Poor mans Sharepoint.
I don't mind AI, but I hate it being baked into every application with its own subscription to access. Just give me an MCP server to connect to when/if I decide I want to use AI with your application.
I love LibreOffice. It is a blast to the past to use it (for better or worse), and each app is incredibly flexible. I used it for creating practice plans last year, and the whiplash from Notion/Logseq and other "friendly" editing tools was tough to get used to. I wonder if there's room for an extension or built-in mode to present a simple or focus mode. It's been a while so I feel like I'd have to get back to using it daily to collect my thoughts on this 😅
Site doesn't load
Firefox has local AI built-in. I really wish people would stop referring to silicon valley technocrat cloud offerings as AI. AI has existed for 70 years. Plenty of academics and innovators that did the hard work to improve science and research are opposed to unchecked capitalists trying to exploit it for their oppressive endeavors. AI isn't inherently good or bad. If you hate technocratic tech bros then just say that.
They declared they have no AI features. The features in Firefox are still AI features. They aren’t needed. They’re a waste of development time and are useless.
I literally say this as someone that has contributed to Firefox.
I have little against the local translation feature, especially given the fact it isn't bundled but a seperate download.
That being said, there are higher priorities, like better history and bookmarks, because the current sidebars are 20+ years old and it shows. Chrome has had it figured out for 10 years straight now.
The right way for AI features would be to partner with outside orgs and projects. As you said, they're a waste of development time. And given how much low hanging fruit there is, there's no justification for following AI trends instead of doing basic UX hygiene.
The Altmans, Palantirs and Musks all refer to their shitty products they're shoving in every product as 'AI', and people understand - they're talking about LLMs. The haters of that group say 'I fucking hate AI' and people understand - they're talking about big corporate LLMs, not some protein folding model that's helping to cure cancer.
Its not complex, and people don't need to elaborate.
The protein folding model was sort of a precursor to the LLMs we have now and advancements in LLMs may yet carry over to such models in the future too. It was also very much a big corporate thing, it was made by Google.
Yeah, like with all "disruptive technology" the first use cases are specialized for tech and science and pure nerdery.
Then the moneybags get a hold of it and throw money at it like nobodies business in the hope of milking the new tech for every penny it's worth. That's also the stage where the less than savoury use cases explode and authorities become interested in using and resisting and regulating and abusing it. This is where we are with "AI" right now.
Only when the technology is sufficiently explored and understood, the bubble is popped and big money has moved on to new disruptive things does it condense back into spaces where it is slowly but surely adapted to foss-models and privacy respecting versions created by community oriented moral people and communities with a conscience. Often the same nerds who helped develop it when it was still for science or specialized tech-applications or general nerdery, but now it's getting build with the understanding how it will influence society and that it'll be a common tool most people use in some way. This is where E2EE, the Fediverse, Linux and the like live. And that is the state where local, efficient, privately run, open source LMs trained on ethically sourced data will need to go before I'll use it with a good conscience.
I have no idea what you're trying to say after reading three times.